Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [151]
14. Internationalization
Refugees and Expats
When the inside had become so solidly inside that all the outside could be outside and the inside inside.
– Gertrude Stein
On the day that Merit Janow and I had coffee on the terrace of the Oriental Hotel back in 1996 and the idea for this book first came to me, the thing that struck us most forcefully at the time was the vibrant international life in Bangkok – the Germans, Chinese, Japanese, Americans, and Thai intermingling in business and social life-and the lack of anything like this in Japan. No country is as obsessed as Japan with the word international; you will find it used as a name for everything from hotels to taxis to soap, and you can hardly get through a single hour in Japan without reading, hearing, or saying international at least once. Yet few modern nations have erected such high barriers against foreign people and ideas.
Japanese and foreign commentators take it as a commonplace that with time Japan is becoming steadily more international. But it could be said that Japan is headed in the opposite direction-back to a quiet form of isolation. The doors to real access to Japan remain firmly closed to foreigners; meanwhile, young Japanese men and women with talent and an international mind-set are leaving their country. This emigration has been going on for a long time, but it picked up pace in the 1990s.
Indeed, escapees from Japan's rigid internal systems have been going abroad since the nineteenth century. Often, they are from disadvantaged backgrounds and have suffered disapproval from their families and from institutions in Japan. When they succeed abroad, they are lionized as heroes at home, after which they can return and engage in activities they could not have initiated within Japan. This is how it was with Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834-1901), the father of modern education, and with Ozawa Seiji in the 1960s, who moved to America after Japan's leading orchestra, sponsored by the national broadcasting company NHK, went on strike against him and refused to play. Ozawa Seiji is one of a number of prominent artists to base themselves abroad. Others include the musician Sakamoto Ryuichi, the composer of the score for the film The Last Emperor; Ishioka Eiko, who won an Academy Award for her costume design in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula; and Senju Hiroshi, the painter whose Waterfall installation won a prize for the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1995. All of these artists live in New York.
The trend continues. Son Masayoshi, often called Japan's Bill Gates, was born the son of Korean immigrants, a minority group that suffers social ostracism, much of it officially sanctioned. «Being of Korean background, I thought as a child that things might be pretty hard,» Son says. So while still in school he moved to the United States. By the time he went to the University of California at Berkeley, he was already a successful young entrepreneur; he made a million dollars in his early twenties when he sold a pocket-translator invention to the Sharp Corporation. «In the United States, people come from all over the world, all races, all backgrounds,» Son says. «And they're all doing what they want, many scoring huge successes. When I saw that, I became more open. It freed my soul.»
In the early 1980s, Son returned to Japan and founded Softbank, which in one decade grew into Japan's largest software distributor and publisher of computer-related magazines. Winning the right to use his Korean last name took longer (naturalized citizens cannot use their foreign names but must choose from a list of officially accepted Japanese names), but he achieved that feat in 1993, after an extended struggle with the immigration authorities. Today, Son is the golden boy of Japanese information technology and is frequently in the news as he buys up software and information businesses around the world.
While the phenomenon of escapees